From Homemaker to Wage Earner in Appalachia

Five years ago, Katie Rollins left her kitchen and barnyard for a regular paying job, as a clerk in Uncle Tom's Grocery and Restaurant here. Her husband, Doug, used to work in a coffin factory, but it closed in 1984; he then lost a second job as a part-time handyman. Now Mrs. Rollins says he is too depressed to look for work.

The economic crunch came when Mrs. Rollins had a miscarriage late in pregnancy five years ago. "I got this bill for $1,700 for 11 hours in the hospital," she said. "We had no insurance. That's when I started making my own decisions."

Katie Rollins's story differs only in the details from those of many other Appalachian women. Pushed by their husbands' unemployment in the region's chronically ailing economy, by family health crises or by their children's leaving home, these women are abandoning the roles of their venerated mothers and grandmothers and joining the labor force.

Such shifts have been going on for two decades elsewhere in the nation, as paychecks have failed to keep up with inflation. But nowhere in this country is the tradition of breadwinner husband and homemaker wife more entrenched than in Appalachia, and nowhere is it under more strain.

Jobs in the region's predominantly he-man economy of mining and logging have been giving way to automation and to diminishing supplies of coal and wood, leaving a growing number of unemployed and broken-spirited men. And the customary domain of women, the family farms that produce tobacco and corn for market and chickens and vegetables for the table, cannot fill the void of the husband's lost paycheck.

People who work with the women say most fear the humiliation of going on welfare, the loss of support when husbands die, become disabled or leave them for other women, or the tedium of the home when the children are grown. When forced to choose between homemaking and survival, they opt for fewer children, getting jobs and, when pushed, divorce.

In Appalachia, unlike much of the rest of the nation, women are displacing men in the workplace as well as joining them. Throughout Kentucky, according to a study covering 1979 to 1986, the number of working men fell about 1 percent while the number of working women grew 12.5 percent. As men's jobs disappear, women take the new jobs that men spurn, mostly in hospitals and nursing homes, in stores and fast-food shops and government offices. Many of the women say their husbands sulk and turn hostile as they grow dependent on the wives' salaries. Needing a Husband, But 'He's Afraid'

At Uncle Tom's, Mrs. Rollins, 36 years old, works a 40-hour week and earns $4.35 an hour, a dime more than the minimum wage. She earns $8.96 an hour when she occasionally fills in for the Paint Lick postmistress. She is also taking local extension courses from Eastern Kentucky University, about 10 miles to the north, so she can become a social worker.

"She's a whirlwind," said John Thomas Clark, manager of Uncle Tom's. "She can do, and will do."

Exhilarated by having proved herself on the job, Mrs. Rollins said, "Right now, I'm in the ball park and I'm going to throw the ball."

Of her husband, she said: "I love him. I need him and he needs me. But we're growing apart. He's at a point where he's afraid."

Mr. Rollins, like most of the husbands of these working women, declined to be interviewed.

At Berea College, 20 minutes from Paint Lick, Jane B. Stephenson runs a tuition-free, three-week program that has helped nearly 100 middle-aged women, among them Mrs. Rollins, make the transition from home to work. She established the foundation-supported program four years ago after her husband, John, a sociologist, left the University of Kentucky in Lexington to become president of Berea.

"The big difference between these women and women in a city like Lexington is that women in Lexington seemed to know where to get help," Mrs. Stephenson said. "These women, from rural areas, don't have anyone to turn to, and in many cases they have no conception of what they can do. They keep saying, 'I don't have any skills; I can't do anything.' "

Sonja Rogers participated in the Berea program in June. Her family lost its main source of income a couple of years ago when the Federal Government, concluding that her husband could work, cut off his $780 monthly Social Security disability payment.

"He would have to have a job that lets him stand for two hours and sit for two hours," Mrs. Rogers said, "and they think he can find one, which he can't."

Mrs. Rogers, 52, still gets a $426 disability check every month because she has an emphysema-like disease. But she wants a job teaching adults how to read.

The struggle for survival drives these women, not the pursuit of equal opportunity or the struggle to maintain a middle-class life style. Of a score of newly employed women interviewed, none spoke of wanting big-money jobs or the ability to buy expensive things.

"These women are filled with courage," said Anita Barker, director of counseling at Berea College. "Most are suffering from poverty, and they are absolutely scared to death."

The women said they wanted jobs helping people, particularly in hospitals and schools. They make little of the more cosmopolitan world's feminist orthodoxy. To get out of the home to work, some turn to their daughters to take over the household chores of cooking and cleaning.

"I'm not a women's libber," Mrs. Rollins said. "I intend one of these days to have someone support me."

Once renowned for large families, Appalachian women still have more babies in their teen-age years than do other women, said Ron Crouch, director of the Kentucky State Data Center at the University of Louisville. But then they stop having them.

West Virginia now has the nation's lowest fertility rate, Mr. Crouch said, and Kentucky, with about a quarter of its population in the eastern, Appalachian, half of the state, ranks next.

Linda Linville, 36, a mother of three, grew up in a family of seven. A graduate of the Berea program who then took courses at a vocational college, she is happily married to a working husband. She has penetrated the middle class with a $10-an-hour job as a hospital respiratory technician. But the road getting there was an arduous one.

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Before her current marriage, she was married twice, first to man who she said abused her and second to "a real ugly, mean person."

During her second marriage, she said, "I held two jobs then, in a laundromat from 3 to 10 in the evening and in the morning at a factory where they made kayaks," Mrs. Linville said. "I didn't have transportation. I didn't have a telephone. The lady who owned the laundromat would pick me up at the factory, and then she would pick up the kids and bring them" to the laundromat. A Growing Network of Self-Help Groups

Women who enter the Berea program have a high school diploma, or later in life they have obtained the equivalent, a general educational development certificate, known as the G.E.D. Others are steered to get G.E.D.'s by church groups and small grass-roots institutions that have cropped up throughout Appalachia.

Here, there is Friends of Paint Lick Inc., an organization begun two years ago by a 73-year-old widow named Harold Dean Sarah Virginia Quinn Cornett. For $12,000 she bought a building next to the post office, having raised the $500 down payment from pennies that people put in a gallon cider bottle.

With help from church groups and the public, Mrs. Cornett provides free clothing, food, books, counsel and space for the University of Eastern Kentucky to teach courses in Paint Lick. Men are welcome, Mrs. Cornett said, but they rarely come.

But plenty of women do. Tabatha Gullette, an 18-year-old who has four younger brothers, burst in one day to show Mrs. Cornett her graduation report card from Rockcastle High School. Mrs. Cornett hugged Miss Gullette and heaped her with praise. "Her mother wants to keep her home and take care of the boys," Mrs. Cornett said. "I want her to get into college. She's got a brilliant mind."

Among a few men in Paint Lick, the axiom that many preach -- a woman's place is in the home -- seems to be under review. "Basically, it's a very good statement," said Mr. Clark, 59, the Uncle Tom's manager. "I think it's in the Bible. The woman bears the children; it's her responsibility to take care of them.

"But Katie, with her son grown, there's not all that much reason for her to be in the home. And we have to give consideration to equal rights to people."

Dennis Vaught, the 25-year-old manager of the small People's Bank of Paint Lick, goes further. His wife, Traci, 24, is an assistant at the county office of the Federal Farmers Home Administration, and they use day care arrangements and sitters for their two children, boys aged 4 and 5. "My ideal is, a woman's place is where she wants it to be," Mr. Vaught said. Feeling the Pressure To Stay at Home

But many husbands, whether they are employed or not, fight their wives' efforts to work.

Betsy Van Winkle's husband worked during their marriage, but when she got a job first in fast-food restaurants and then in nursing homes, she said, he "objected very, very strongly."

"I would get so tired I couldn't keep up with everything that he wanted to do," said Mrs. Van Winkle, 49, who is now divorced. "He accused me of sleeping with my patients. Patients in a nursing home. Then in the last year and a half of our marriage, he encouraged me to work. We didn't know about this other woman then."

Kathy Hamblin, 38, weeps when she is asked about looking for work. "When they saw you hadn't worked for 16 years, they threw your application in the reject pile," she said.

Now considering training to become a hospital technician, Mrs. Hamblin was divorced last year after 16 years of marriage. She has two children.

Her husband worked throughout their marriage, she said, but "he didn't want me to work for all those years."

"And I never cleaned house as well as his mother did," she said. "His mother washes the walls once a month. That's the way he controlled me. He made himself feel better by putting me down."

Linda Gadd was one of 10 children raised in a coal-country home that she called "pretty much an open bar for the neighborhood." Her parents would disappear for as long as five days. She married at 13 to a 21-year-old farmer who stopped in to restore the electricity when the fuses blew. She had all her five children by the time she was 20.

Now 38, Mrs. Gadd said she became alarmed about what she would do now that her children were grown. She got a G.E.D., joined the Berea program, became a social worker and is studying to become a registered nurse.

"What I realized at age 34 was that I had never gotten a chance to grow up," Mrs. Gadd said. Having a baby at 14 was just an extension of the only role she knew, helping to raise her six younger brothers and sisters when she herself was a child.

"My husband is a good provider and a good father," she said. But since she began working and bringing home textbooks, she said, a week can go by when they don't speak.

"I had taken the role of him being my father," Mrs. Gadd said. "He didn't know how to deal with me being a grown-up. His words were he wanted his Linda back."

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A version of this article appears in print on July 7, 1991, on Page 1001001 of the National edition with the headline: From Homemaker to Wage Earner in Appalachia. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe